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Talking with your grandparents never happens as it does in the movies, where a wizened and good-natured elder takes the time to impart decades of accumulated knowledge to their eager-to-listen grandchildren. No, we’re too busy to take the time, and even when we do, there are family politics, taboo subjects, miscommunications and a host of other factors that get in the way.

David Suzuki’s newest book, Letters To My Grandchildren, is an acknowledgement of this reality. His six grandkids are spread across the country and have such a range in age as to defy any attempt to tailor a message that all of them could understand.

So the seventy-nine-year-old Suzuki commits the exercise to paper. While he crafts individual letters to each grandchild, he saves them for the end, devoting the bulk of the book to thematically-based letters addressed to all of them. He relates the experiences he’s accumulated from a childhood in a Japanese internment camp in interior B.C. to an adolescence on a farm in Leamington through his studies as a geneticist and his career as a public scientist travelling the world to report on emerging threats to the environment. It’s quite an incredible life he’s lived so far and it’s no wonder Suzuki feels the need to make sure its lessons — about intolerance, hard work, family, scientific inquiry, activism, media and ecology — make it to his descendants, the youngest of whom is not even a year old.

In a voice so familiar that you feel like you can hear it coming from your TV or radio, Suzuki reflects on his duty as an elder and how their voices of accumulated knowledge have been lost in an immigrant society like our own — where grandparents are left behind in a home country, or disconnected through a language barrier.

Much of what he writes is familiar to many Canadians over the age of 35, but the power of this book comes from its accessibility to a new generation, reintroducing Suzuki not as the “freak” scientist from Suzuki on Science, not as the environmental activist familiar from logging battles on the west coast, not even as the moral voice in politics he has become through his foundation, but as a public figure the likes of which only this country could have produced.

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Suzuki talks about his own grandparents, who didn’t speak a word of English and remained foreign to him because he couldn’t speak Japanese, and the difficulties of migration and racism that put them all in internment camps and finally led some of them to return, disillusioned with the new world, to a post-Hiroshima Japan.

He spends a lot of time applying his understanding of biological evolution and genetic diversity to modern society, celebrating the multiculturalism that has emerged over his lifetime and permeated his own family — which now includes Japanese, Haida, Chilean, English and Métis heritage.

But his voice strikes a clarion note when turning to the future and discussing the structural barriers to combating climate change. He’s flummoxed by the bigger-is-better economics that ignore the carrying capacity of the earth. He’s outraged by the short-term decisions made to maximize corporate profit that are diametrically opposed to the long-held tradition of safeguarding the world for our children. Calling this an “intergenerational crime,” he laments that there is no way to prosecute under existing laws.

He also fingers short electoral cycles that put politicians in perpetual campaigns. Because future generations don’t get a vote, the expensive and long-term programs necessary to preserve the environment become “political suicide.”

But the very act of having children, he says, is a commitment to ensuring a better world for them. And without sugar-coating it, he passes the torch to his grandchildren, asking them to understand he’s done everything he could.

At his worst, Suzuki sounds like a grumpy old man, complaining of newfangled technologies such as cellphones, but at his best, he’s recounting stories from a different age and pulling out the lessons for today, sounding less like a celebrity scientist and more like your granddad — or the one you wish you had.

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